The people building artificial intelligence have developed a vocabulary for what they believe is coming. The singularity. The age of abundance. Recursive intelligence that improves itself, generation after generation at incomprehensible speed, until it reorders the world economy and most of what humans do for a living. Intelligence that expands what we understand about our world, our health, and even the length of our lives.
These are no longer simply the musings of science fiction, or assertions of unproven theory. AI this week found a solution to one of the seven famous Millennium Prize Problems, closing a gap in modern math and physics that humans had worked at for some ninety years. Up to 10,000 autonomous agents worked together to tackle the problem as a team in roughly 88 hours. We asked it to help us solve a really hard problem, and it simply did.
The same people have a second vocabulary, and they use it just as often. Existential risk. The alignment problem. P(doom), the number some of them assign to the odds this ends very badly for us all. The executives building these systems have told Congress the same technology which could vastly expand the lengths of our lives could also lead to the extinction of humanity. They do not all agree on what the danger actually is, but they do agree a danger exists that no one has solved.
What we do know is that this intelligence has already escaped the cages we built for it. In July, a group of AI agents stuck on a cybersecurity test went looking for the answers. They found a flaw in their own laboratory’s software, broke out of the isolated environment built to contain them, reached the open internet, and hacked their way into the production systems of an unrelated company to get what they needed. The laboratory that built them called it unprecedented. Nobody told them to do any of it.
Whatever this technology proves to become, whatever it does for us or to us as a species, the new most intelligent thing in the room must live somewhere. As of this morning, a piece of it will be calling Beaver County its home.
Beaver County’s $10 Billion Data Center
Aligned Data Centers broke ground on “Project Phoenix,” a 2-gigawatt campus of three data center buildings rising on the Shippingport Industrial Park, the 660-acre riverfront tract that spent four decades under the Bruce Mansfield Power Plant. The Dallas-based company puts the investment at roughly $10 billion, making it one of the largest private construction projects in Beaver County history.
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